Stimulated!: Habits to Spark Your Creative Genius at Work [Hardcover]

Andrew Pek (Author), Jeannine Mcglade (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2008

*Winner of the Print Industries of America's Benny Award for jacket design*

With the pace of competition, innovation, and change in today's world, creativity isn't a luxury--it's a survival skill. But even the most creative people can end up stuck, stressed out, and stale, worn down by the daily grind.

Stimulated! is an energetic exploration of five habits that can help you release your creativity and expand your innovative thinking. The method is playful, fun, enriching, and mind-expanding, but most important, it's a step-by-step process for getting unstuck.

With Stimulated!, you learn

• how to draw inspiration and fresh insights from the world around you;
• how to make the most of your surroundings and develop an environment that will get the creative juices flowing;
• how to turn work into play;
• how to take the leap of faith and commit to big, bold ideas; and
• how to reap the benefits of your success and failures to contribute to the next creative effort.

Praise for Stimulated!:

'Stuck in a rut? Stimulated! will awaken possibilities you never thought existed. Read this book and jump start your life!' --Ken Blanchard, author of One Minute Manager and Know Can Do!

'As an innovation how-to, Stimulated! is a fascinating book that is full of ways to help you unlock your creative potential.' --Neal Goldberg, President, The Children's Place

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The daily drone can sap the spark of the most creative personality; this sparse, saccharine manual offers a few easy steps to revive creativity and incorporate inspiration into a daily routine. Pek and McGlade (noves: recipes for growth and innovation) posit that the need to create is a basic human urge that is not only an evolutionary imperative, but a spiritual one, capable of mitigating everyday stresses that can lead to burnout. Citing examples of people who have pursued creative satisfaction and attained material success, such as Nike cofounder Bill Bowerman, the authors demonstrate the importance and the rewards of maintaining creative thought processes. Pek and McGlade [...] are very earnest about their program, a series of five habits that can access creative potential: scouting, cultivating, playing, venturing, and harvesting. But for a book about stimulating creativity, the solutions and suggestions—the power of play, the importance of confidence and spark moments—are strikingly uninspired. Padded with trite aphorisms and unnecessary illustrations, the slim content is sufficient for a peppy magazine article—not a full-length book. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

Creativity--something that used to be ignored in the business world, but now is a necessity. Stimulated! Habits to Spark Your Creative Genius at Work is a guide to get those now required juices flowing and get everything one needs to make the most of their time. Focusing on the details of how to draw inspiration from the world, making a proper environment to facilitate one's thoughts, committing oneself, learning from one's failures, and most importantly, learning to have fun with one's job, Stimulated! is ideal for anyone in a field calling for creativity. Highly recommended for community library business collections. --Midwest Book Review

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group, LLC (April 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1929774508
• ISBN-13: 978-1929774500
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #994,965 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Stimulated and titillated, July 17, 2008

By 

Terry Kavouras "terrykav" (Cleveland, OH) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Stimulated!: Habits to Spark Your Creative Genius at Work (Hardcover)

Pek and McGlade's book is as promised: an idea-packed, fun, and yes, stimulating book. This book tickles the recesses of your brain to help you mine your creativity, ingenuity and have fun doing so. Recommended for knocking the cobwebs from your mental gearbox.

TK

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Making American Industry Great Once Again, July 5, 2008

By 

Egbert F. Bhatty (Ridgewood, NJ United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Stimulated!: Habits to Spark Your Creative Genius at Work (Hardcover)

The American auto industry is almost belly up. American airlines are in a tailspin. Other major manufacturing and service sectors of American industry are in a state of collapse.

Not all of the problems of American industry are related to the price of oil. The lack of creativity and innovativeness in these industries is a large part of their problems.

There are those who contend that creativity just comes naturally to some people, like, for example, Ben Franklin and Albert Einstein. Not so, say Pek and McGlade, the husband-and-wife team of international consultants in creativity and innovation, in Stimulated!, their second offering on the subject.

Everyone, they contend, is born creative. But, the pressures of hierarchy and conformity in the modern American organization kill these creative instincts. Which, in turn, has led to the "can't do" culture prevalent in American industry today.

How to release our nascent, native creative energies, that not just a short while ago were responsible for the worldwide supremacy of American manufacturing and service, is what Pek and McGlade are all about.

Stimulated! lays out a 5-step process that Pek and McGlade have successfully implemented in Corporations in the US and in Europe. The five steps consist of Scouting for new ideas and insights; Cultivating these ideas; Playing with them in one's mind, Venturing to put these ideas into practice; and Harvesting the results. The interplay of these five steps leads to the generation of not just one or two good ideas, but, to a cascade of original insights that psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls "flow".

What kinds of projects have benefited from Pek and McGlade's creativity and innovation program? - changing the culture of the organization, developing new learning methodologies, raising the esprit de corps of teams and groups, doubling business volume, connecting the global workforce, creating unique competitive strategies, improving the work ethic, spurring product/service innovations, to name but a few.

Given the doldrums in which the auto, the airlines, and other major sectors of American industry find itself, Stimulated! is just the right book for the times! Anyone who owns a business, or runs a business, and wants to make the business more creative, more productive should devour the book entirely, and early.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sparked and Stimulated, July 7, 2010

By 

Ed Manning - See all my reviews

This review is from: Stimulated!: Habits to Spark Your Creative Genius at Work (Hardcover)

It's paradoxical how business - any business - inadvertently creates an environment that is stifling to the very qualities it needs to nurture: Innovation and creativity. Especially in this somewhat crippled economy, fear and politics often become the norm, leaving little room for new ideas, risk taking, and true innovative thought.

Stimulated doesn't just make a compelling case why innovation and creativity are critical elements of a flourishing life or business. It reminds the reader that innovation and creativity are part of a process that we all need to practice. It provides a guide and tools to stay the creative course, find "sparks," and nurture and harvest them into compelling ideas and ultimately profitable results.

Anyone can wave a flag and shout "be creative." Heard it before, been there, done that - it's the innovator's version of the senior sales "pontificator" who regales his team with the dubious wisdom of, "we need to sell more." Stimulated clearly differentiates itself by going much deeper. The art of this book (aside from some very cool graphics) is that it charts a clear path with clear objectives - objectives any business and any business person should care about intensely.